999, 916: Screamin' Jay Hawkins - I Put a Spell on You

Talk is cheap. And musically speaking, the emptiest of all empty threats usually comes when retribution is promised for unfaithful behavior. Sure, nobody likes it when their significant other runs around on them, or worse, puts them down. This is obviously unacceptable. But in song, it's met only by snarls of impotent menace, if that.

The ne plus ultra of fruitless fist shaking, though, has to be the pledge to put a spell on someone. It's like saying you're going to take them to Narnia and leave them at the mercy of the Keebler elves. It's nonsense. And whether it's me or John Fogerty or Smedclaw the Petty from your LARPing party saying it, it's equally hollow in every instance (unless your 5th level fighter is in range of Smedclaw's magical attack. Look out!).

And that has to go double for Screamin' Jay Hawkins. We're talking about a guy who hung out in a coffin, wore a leopard skin Dracula suit, and stomped around on stage while brandishing a stick with a plastic skull stuck on the end of it. It's a ludicrous put-on, a rock voodoo minstrel show. This is a guy who spouted gibberish between verses and famously recorded a song about going to the bathroom. His powers of the supernatural probably rival those of a battery-operated talking Frankenstein head.

But paying too much attention to Hawkins' ridiculous occult affectations is missing the point, especially when it comes to "I Put a Spell on You". For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of the person who's dismissed this man's amorous advances. Now listen to him bellowing, "I love you I love you/I love you anyhow", his eyes rolling back in his head as he pounds on the piano. "I don't care if you don't want me/I'm yours right now", pealing out in his failed opera singer's yowl. Now that's a threat that should turn your spine cold.

I Put A Spell On You - Screami...

999,917: Buck Owens — Under the Influence of Love

A lot of male country musicians made their bread lamenting their difficulties with women, but maybe none looked the part of a spurnable man so much as Buck Owens. With a generous nose, tiny eyes, and a large, wide grin, Owens' goober-esque face was the model of doofiness. If he'd had to make it in the music business today, he'd probably have to go the Marilyn Manson route.

Luckily, all he needed in the late '50s was to put on a nudie suit and invent a new style of country music. Dubbed the Bakersfield Sound for Owens' home town, it was an offshoot of the Honky Tonk genre, with electric bass and guitars, a fiddle, and steady back beat that was deemed by some to be far too aggressive for the chaste ears of country fans. Owens, who would later star on Hee-Haw and adorn the lobby of his Crystal Palace venue with a statue of himself clutching the "Holy Bible", was nonetheless considered a dangerous quantity by the string-soaked countrypolitan establishment. Owens' musical direction was so feared that he was forced to record a rockabilly song under an assumed name, Corky Jones—"that's the fearsome Corky Jones, rockabilly defiler!"

"Under the Influence of Love", then, must have caused apoplexy on a Pope photo-destroying scale. Not only did this catchy number sport the hard-driving jungle drums (the "freight train sound") loathed by demure gentility, it equated the affections of the fairer sex with illegal and degenerate narcotics. It was said that playing this record backwards caused the devil's erect penis to appear in tea parlors throughout the land. Nice fiddle work by Don Rich, though!

Under the Influence of Love - ...

999,918: Smog — 37 Push Ups

While this song is pretty far from the top of the current list, it’s got to be up there on the Top One Million Songs About Broken Men in Motel Rooms blog. Way up there. And it’s earned its place. It’s a perfectly executed character sketch, drawn with a few bold lines.

Anyone who has ever stayed in a cheap motel near the beach in the winter knows it can be a lonely, depressing place, but that's where he spends his time. He must be making some pretty bad decisions, among them listening to tapes of classic rock radio, instead of just buying a copy of Highway to Hell. Also, you'd think someone who did so many push ups would be able to do at least 50 or so. Something isn't right. When he admits to “not looking too good, not feeling too well”... well, you figured that.

With just these few details, Smog mastermind Bill Callahan creates a broken man out of thin air, obsessively counting pushups, alone and off balance, while a staticy AC/DC song blares from cheap speakers.

Part of what brings this pathetic specimen to life is the music. You can imagine explaining the Velvet Underground to the poor guy this song is about, giving him an old Radio Shack tape recorder and a few broken instruments, turning him loose, and ending up with music that sounds something like this, bursting with noisy voilin screeches and off kilter drones, but never really going anywhere. The lo fi crackle reminds you that, unlike Lou Reed, this guy isn’t going to end up showing his tasteful cityscape photography in any upscale galleries.

999,919: Aztec Camera — Jump

What is an “Aztec Camera”? Some sort of ancient Mezoamerican astrological device? A cheap disposable 35mm from south of the border? Yes, an Aztec Camera is all these things. However, judging from this song I think it might also be a device that changes a thing into a snapshot of its opposite. Put “white” in the chute, and out pops “black”. Put “hate” in, and “love” come out the other end. Put “Jump” by Van Halen in, and “Jump” by Aztec Camera shoots out the back.

Like magic, the signature synth line has become a tasteful acoustic guitar. Alex Van Halen’s pounding drums have been replaced by what is either a drum machine, or a drummer so lifeless and rote he might as well be one. David Lee Roth’s infantile yelping has morphed into stately Scottish sad sack smoothery. How could two songs be more opposite? Different words wouldn’t help. Opposites are always similar in basic ways. There’s a reason the opposite of “love” isn’t “knife”. Only another strong emotion will do.

As long as copies of the original song exist, there are very few reasons to listen to this version apart from 1) a purely academic examination of what makes a thing a thing and another thing another thing and not a thing, or 2) to piss off, say, a maternal uncle, or a mechanic, or some other VH enthusiast.

It’s a good thing this track exists, though. If, God forbid, something should happen to all the digital and physical copies of 1984 and all the “Jump” cassingles, we could end up with a passable copy of the original if we fed this version into an Aztec Camera.

999,920: Neutral Milk Hotel — In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea ...

There was a good stretch of time, back around the turn of the century, when I would get mixtapes from a particular type of girl. These were girls with homemade haircuts and craft projects littering their apartments. This is one of the songs that, if it were on one of those mixtapes, would make me sure that they’d totally have sex with me.

Looking back, I realize that if someone spends several hours (or – ahem – days) sitting in front of a tape deck ordering, cueing, volume-matching and recording 90 minutes of music in real time, hand-lettering the tracklist in a perfectly tiny font, and creating a cover collage, that they’ll totally have sex with you, regardless of what songs they choose. It could be all death metal; if it’s wrapped with a ribbon, pack extra Trojans, buddy, it’s your lucky day.

“Aeroplane” is the sweetest song on the record with which it shares a title, which isn’t really saying much, considering the record is a howling, yowling bad-trip carnival ride, populated with mutilated mutants, dead girls and semen-stained mountaintops. The song itself contains instructions for reanimating a corpse like a hand puppet.

Starting as a coffee house folk-trip, a pack of singing saws and warped horns drift in and out like wind, whistling at the windows, while the fingertips of tree limbs tip-tap on the panes, casting shadows of ghost-hands into a third-floor bedroom, a mattress lying directly on the floor. Jeff Mangum’s singing is comparatively restrained, cracking against its upper-limits only a few times, as if tethered. It threatens to become unhinged, but never goes full crazy.

It’s one of the few human moments on the album, the break in the nightmare that reminds you that it’s all a dream, that the trip is worth taking, and how another person can be that break for you in the swirling whirl of shit and evil that we inhabit.

Sometimes the only way you can say something as intimate, or as intimidatingly corny, as “you’re my anchor” or “I would like to take ecstasy and have sex with you on my futon” is in coded messages. It pays to be tactful when you’re trying to be cool. Where Barbra Streisand’s “People” is a hammer of desperation and isolation that would send me running, this is a hint.

In retrospect, I should have seen those ladies’ issues coming from a mile away.

999,921: Dwight Yoakam — Little Ways

Little Ways - Dwight Yoakam

I used to be one of those twits who would say they liked “everything but country” when asked what music they liked. Not only does saying this make you sound like a jackass, discounting an entire genre, but it makes you sound like you are an otherwise non-discerning individual, devoid of taste.

In time, I revised that sentiment to be that I didn’t like “new country.” While that remains true, what I should have said is that I like good country, and then provided examples. Classic country, as anyone with a Time-Life collection can attest, can easily be as reprehensible and cloying as anything that Garth Brooks has churned out.

Because of my default setting for not liking any country music produced after 1975, it took until I was 30 years old to be introduced to the genius of Dwight Yoakam.

I should have known that he was the real deal when started playing such offensively awful people in independent films, but I’m a stubborn old goat. Admitting that I’ve been wrong is something that comes to me about as easily as liking any type of music my childhood barber would cut my hair to.

Yoakam is a country traditionalist, not only in songcraft, but instrumentation. His first few albums could easily be a backroom bar combo bouncing through 3-hour sets behind chicken wire for 50 bucks and steady diet of Old Milwaukee. Cans, thanks.

“Little Ways” overcomes its unfortunate ‘80s production aesthetics (check the drums, which sound like they were generated on the least-offensive Yamaha keyboard imaginable), with a drunken shuffle that breaks apart, hesitates and hiccups on the title line of the choruses, and a growling, Duane Eddy-style guitar, playing the role of a belching, drunken, lovesick fool, so besotted that the fiddle needs to finish off the solo.

Yoakam’s shame at being a big man made into a broken baby by a lovely little lady is evident in his vocal croaks and creaks. It could be my love letter to country music itself.

I can’t believe I’m admitting this in public, country music. You’ve hurt me, you’ve made me cry and I love you. I don’t know if it’s because of - or in spite of - what you do to me, just, please, keep doing it.

999,922: Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles — Lava

Lava - Label Copy Conversion/L...

From late ‘71 through the beginning of 1972, Santana and The Buddy Miles Express formed like Voltron to tour the land and inhale all the cocaine ever produced. It was a bold task, something that no one would try again until Ozzy went out on the road with Motley Crue in ‘84.

The resultant album contains no less than seven (7!) drummers and percussionists playing at the same time, a pre-Journey Neal Schon, and Carlos and Buddy playing the fastest versions of their songs ever committed to tape.

“Lava” is that sweet period rarity: an instrumental that wraps things up at around 2 minutes. The length could be the result of some after-the-fact editing, considering that Side B of the album is a 25-minute epic jam, but thank the rock gods that you can listen to it in this releasable form.

It’s simple, not deceptively simple, but wickedly simple. A single, ass-ripping garage-riff over a cataclysm of percussion is the backdrop for Santana, who makes his guitar squeal like a demon in the midst of an exorcism. The band runs it hotter and higher until, fretless, they collapse into the Standard Rock’N’Roll Hold-That-Last-Note-Forever Ending™.

This shit is fucking atomic fire death-rays rocking your puny little head, while the ghost of Jimi Hendrix pisses in your face. Can I get a witness?

999,923: Elvis Presley - Yoga Is As Yoga Does

Why do humans create? To leave our mark on the world? To communicate with our fellow beings what we can’t fully express through social interaction? To tap into the deepest truths of our baffling existence? Well, if it’s any of those, I don’t know how anyone ever creates anything, because the stakes are so impossibly goddamn high it’s no fun anymore. So then, which is the more interesting piece of art: a consciously crafted attempt at a major statement by someone whose truths are neither as deep nor as significant as they suspect? Or something tossed off quickly by someone who knows their craft but is not really inspired, instead squeezing something out of their subconscious, like a half-expected fart of yet-unknown pungency, because forces beyond their control dictate that something must be produced? Unless you have not seen the song title above, you know what my answer is going to be. Often, the truly baffling miscalculations happen when people are trying to create something that will make money, but have no personal connection to the ideas they come up with.

Elvis Presley’s movie deal was running out by the time of 1967’s Easy Come Easy Go, and everybody involved was half-assing what was already a half-assed project to begin with. (So, quarter-assing.) Elvis’ character here is a singer (go figure), but also an ex-Navy diver who knows about a sunken ship full of treasure. He meets this chick who’s a go-go dancer and a freaky beatnik (in a stunningly accurate depiction of the counterculture in 1967). But somehow she also knows (or does?) something that Elvis needs to go recover this treasure, and I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was, just from the brief period I spent reading plot summaries of this movie to figure out where the hell this song fit into it. Anyway, I guess they meet in yoga class, or something. It’s a classic chicken-egg scenario: did they write this song to fit the yoga scene that was already planned for the movie, or was the yoga scene written to accommodate this pre-existing song about how silly and funny yoga looks to a simple country-rooted man of the people like Elvis? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. What is certain is that nobody here is burdened by an attempt to create great art. The stakes are low. The budget is low, nobody is all that interested in the project, just fucking write something and get it over with. And so we get this indelibly asinine novelty song that rhymes “take this yoga serious” with “pain in my posterius.”

Surrounding circumstances being what they were, it’s arguable that this moment is the absolute nadir of Elvis’ career, so much so that the following year he made an unequivocal return to the music that made him famous. And for that, “Yoga Is As Yoga Does” is far more memorable than the many more nondescript tunes Elvis recorded for his movie soundtracks. Interestingly, the version that appears in the movie features vocals from the yoga teacher (played by Elsa Lanchester) on a good share of the lines, while Elvis handled everything on the version issued on the soundtrack recording. Listen to the two different versions posted below, and pretend you are studiously comparing alternate takes of jazz compositions to hear the instructive differences in the players’ solos.

999,924: Cub Koda - Random Drug Testing

Following the breakup of ‘70s hard rockers Brownsville Station (you know, the original version of “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room”), frontman Cub Koda returned to his first love, American roots music (country, blues, early rock ‘n’ roll and R&B, etc.), both as a solo performer and music journalist. In keeping with the high energy he brought to Brownsville, Koda’s tastes ran especially toward the wild, the wacky, and the intense. His attempts to capture those qualities in his own material often focused on the wacky, based on his conviction that roots music should sound fun and lively, rather than like museum pieces from bygone days.

If the results often sounded like jokey novelties, they were occasionally transcendent ones, like 1995’s cult college-radio hit “Random Drug Testing.” It’s constructed like a simple field holler or work song from the deepest roots of African-American music, and the production is intentionally lo-fi, emulating the sound of a vintage field recording. There are no instruments besides makeshift percussion, and everything sounds very informal, with everyone in the studio joining in on the main repeated line in the song’s simple call-and-response pattern. And what is the repeated line? Well, it’s the kind of less physically abusive oppression that workers in 1995 would have to complain about – namely, the boss man says you gotta pee in the cup. There follows a parade of other authority figures telling you to pee in the cup, and much lamentation (and whooping) from Cub and his crew. Mostly, though, it’s a group of grown men chanting “pee in the cup” over and over again for two solid minutes. Oddly, a grand total of three songwriters are credited on this track.

If the whole enterprise is silly, what’s really jarring to our ears is hearing this simple style of music addressing topics from our complex high-tech modern world. In our current rock age, where anti-commercial concerns about “art” can often lead to willfully inaccessible lyrics, or studio-crafted soundscapes not centered around melody, it’s a reminder that the entire concept of popular music was originally rooted in the simple joy of singing along to something that’s easy to remember. No, really! Now go pee in the cup.

999,925: Paul Davis - Superstar

Have you ever heard Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music,” from 1967? It’s a love letter to/advertisement for contemporary soul music, name-checking all of Arthur’s favorites and really doing little else with the lyrics. Now, have you ever wished there was an equivalent for the soft sounds of the ‘70s? Well, you’re in luck, because country-tinged soft-rocker Paul Davis recorded one called “Superstar,” which barely scraped into the Top 40 in 1976. Paul name-checks all his smoothest favorites, dropping semi-inside references along the way to make sure we believe in his fanboy credentials. He makes sure to note that Bernie Taupin writes the words to his favorite Elton John tunes, like “Philadelphia Freedom.” Stevie is, of course, described as a “wonder.” Joni Mitchell cheers him up when he’s feeling “blue” – just like the title of her signature album! – which makes him think he’s falling in love with her. The greatest moment, of course, comes when Davis compliments Linda Ronstadt on her recent weight loss. It’s sincere, admiring, and not more than a little bit awkward.

And that’s the subtext for the whole song, really. Soft rock helped men mellow out and discover their feelings, and like many folks noticing their own emotions for the first time, their expression is awkward, simple, and uncomfortably direct. There’s rather too much significance attached to personal feelings simply by virtue of their being personal, or perhaps the amazement at having learned how to pay attention to this sort of thing on a very basic level. Either way, there’s a pride of ownership and a celebration of the interior self that isn’t quite proportionate to what it communicates to the rest of the world. So “Superstar” tells us not only which artists Paul Davis enjoys, but how they make him feel. Basically, they make him feel good. With their music. So he LOVES them. As people. And as women, if the shoe fits. Their music sounds good to him. It makes him see. He has to personally thank them for what they are, because of what they mean to him. It’s entirely personal, as opposed to Arthur Conley shouting “Do ya like good music?! Ha! Whoa yeah!”

But on the other hand, what’s so wrong with that? Is this guy really a weenie? He’s just being honest. Is my discomfort with his clearly visible emotions just a projection of my own fear of vulnerability? Hasn’t recent research shown that people with active social lives and meaningful relationships live longer? Couldn’t we all use a little more openness and warmth with the people in our lives? Wait…on second thought, the people he’s being open with aren’t actually in his life, and he’s sort of trying to bone Joni Mitchell. Never mind.

999, 926: Slipknot - People=Shit

You ever have one of those days where your teacher makes you re-write your stupid English paper, your boss at Subway makes you clean the bathroom and your old man just WON’T GET OFF YOUR CASE? Few songs perfectly capture the feelings of that day better than Slipknot’s Nü-metal anthem “People=Shit.” Perhaps, with their horror movie costumes and gory stage shows, Slipknot meant this song to be a portrait of the mind of a psycho-killer, what with lines like “come on motherf***er everybody has to die!,” but to me it really just sounds like the angry rant of somebody having an annoying day. It could just as easily have been titled “Traffic=shit” or “My Cable Provider=shit.” It’s about being fed up with every day life.

But Slipknot aren’t just irritated. They’re two pounding drummers, a wall of de-tuned guitars and inobtrusive late-nineties record-scratching-irritated. And oddly enough, they’re also, as they admit in “People=shit”, “not afraid to cry.” I guess that’s what makes today’s angry metal heads different from the heavy-metal parking lot Judas-Priest-fan types of the 80’s. They’re in touch with the entire range of human emotion. Just a minute or so after confessing, at the top of his lungs, that he’s willing to let a solitary tear pour down his cheek, clouding his chamomile tea ever so slightly, Mr. Slipknot brags that he’s “sitting at the side of Satan” so “stop your bitchin’.” It’s enough to make me want to put my arm around singer Corey Taylor and say, “People don’t=shit. It’s not believing in yourself that=shit.”

999,927: Maze feat. Frankie Beverly - Back In Stride

Some people just can't cross over to save their life. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly had 15 Top 20 R&B singles. But when it came to the "Pop" (or "white") chart, they had zero. In fact they only had 3 songs in the Top 100. Why is this? After all, "Back in Stride", their R&B chart topping 1985 hit, seems like it would be perfectly entertaining to a white person that enjoyed Michael Jackson doing "P.Y.T." It has a similar bouncy and funky but not too funky beat and peppy singing interrupted by only an occassional "wooooohoooohow" yowl of joy. So what kept Frankie Beverly off the Top 40 despite the charms of this upbeat, catchy pop song?

BEARDS:

My theory: most of the members of Frankie Beverly and Maze had thick beards. This was 1985. The height of the Reagan 80's. After the hairy 70's, the last thing young America wanted to see was a bunch of men in beards. A glance at the top pop hits of 1985 reveal the big chart toppers were Tears for Fears, Mr. Mister, Duran Duran, Simple Minds and A-Ha - not a single trace of stubble in the bunch. Most of them looked like they either shaved 3 times a day or had some kind of hormone deficiency that kept their ruddy, dimpled, British cheeks smooth as Frankie Beverly's vocals. Lionel Richie had a big year as well, but further research indicates that what was on his face was, in fact, an enormous moustache.

Now that time has passed and the members of Mr. Mister and A-Ha are forced to have beards because they live under a bridge somewhere and have no access to disinfected razors, we can listen to "Back in Stride" and imagine an alternate universe where the positivity of this song made it one of those really popular "We're Getting Back Together" jams, like Peaches & Herb's "Reunited," something that people of all races sing at Karaoke nights and bands play at weddings. It's the perfect song to play when you step out of the house after a week without shaving.

999,929: Matthew Sweet — Sick of Myself; 999,928: The XX — Intro

When I was in college in the mid-90's I used to love music that was full of chaos, experiments and happy accidents. Nothing was more boring than an album where everything sounded like it happened "on purpose." If a review described a band as "shambolic" I bought the album. The results weren't always pleasant to listen to, but they were always surprising. And you got the feeling that the musicians were just as surprised as your were.

I was in a band myself. We were all about 19 years old and willfully ignorant of anything approaching traditional songcraft. Our standard songwriting model was to noodle aimlessly until we hit on something that sounded cool, even if we had no idea WHY it sounded cool. "What chord was that?" The other guitarist would often ask me. "I don't know" was usually my reply. And this attitude wasn't just reserved for us kids. At the same time guys like Thurston Moore were trying their best for forget how to play guitar. He would endlessly invent new tunings for his instrument to ensure that, when the critical moment came, he wouldn't know what the fuck he was doing. Matthew Sweet, burdened with every page of the popcraft playbook already burned into his brain devised the clever workaround of not telling his lead guitarist Richard Lloyd anything about the songs he was about to record until the tape was rolling. That process led to some decidedly unhinged solos, such as the one that graces "Sick of Myself," off of the album 100% fun. And it works! The headlights come on and Lloyd scampers like a startled squirrel through the thick untrimmed shrubbery of Sweet's front-and-center rhythm guitar. What might have been another lifeless power-pop exercise is given a shambolic jolt of life.

Less successful were my own college band's experiments with musical chaos. Sometimes noise is just noise. But before giving up I did learn one enduring musical lesson from the experience, and it was completely by accident. Not the kind of accident where I played a G hypophrygian mode over an A flat minor progression and discovered an entirely now harmonic structure. It was the kind of accident where my guitar came unplugged from it's amp and nobody, including me, noticed until the song was over. After that I realized that my band, or at least my contribution to the band, was kind of bullshit, and I discovered a taste for music that was a little more carefully composed. I wanted musicians who heard the music in their heads before they committed it to tape; who didn't just hit record then clean up the mess afterwords. In short I wanted music that sounded like it was "on purpose."

Which brings me to the XX. If you want more purposeful music than this then I suggest the classical music aisle. They may not be the most skilled musicians in the world, but they could be the most disciplined, or at least the most disciplined band of teenagers to self-produce their own album. This, their first album, was recorded when they were only 19 years old. Here is a band where the old cliche "not a note out of place" is finally apt. Check out the track "Intro," literally just a short, nearly instrumental, intro to the album. It's also a fully developed statement of purpose, carved with lasers down to it's most essential elements.

Try this. Take a pass through the song and ONLY listen to a single instrument. Or hell, just listen to the kick drum. Every beat is there for a reason. While moving or removing one wouldn't exactly ruin the song, it would change the equation in some way. It would alter the tone or shift the emplhasis. It's rare that you hear this much thought going into each an every beat of a single drum, even in programmed drums like these, which allow for endless editing and the the finest grade attention to detail. The temptation to loop it and leave it is just too great. And since the advent of unlimited multitracking it's seldom that you hear a band with such an unerring sense of where the listener's focus needs to be at each and every moment, of each and every song, for an entire album. Equally rare is their ability to then direct the listeners attention to the focal point and make it all sound so effortless. What more could you ask for?

Well, a little spontaneity wouldn't hurt. For years I've been searching for a band that was exactly like the XX, and now that I've heard them well, I love them, but they also gets me itching for something that's a little rougher around the edges. I makes me want to hear a band that hits record without asking what key the song is in. It makes me wonder what a recording of a guitar getting accidently unplugged halfway through a song would sound like. Maybe it would sound pretty cool, even if your weren't exactly sure why.

Sick Of Myself - Matthew Sweet

Intro - The xx

999,930: Cannonball Adderley — Snakin' the Grass

After a stint at Capitol which saw the quality of Adderley's music deteriorate as he endlessly chased after the freakish success of "Mercy Mercy Mercy", the veteran alto player landed at Fantasy with A&R man Orrin Keepnews, who'd produced some of Cannonball's earliest hard bop dates as a leader on Riverside. Knowing that Adderley recorded best in front of an audience, Keepnews pulled as many warm bodies as he could into the studio, set up a bar, and distributed what the liner notes call "magical brownies", hint hint. In front of such a pliant crowd, Adderley went to work with perhaps the sickest rhythm section he'd employed since parting ways with bassist Sam Jones in the early '60s, headed up by Walter Booker and Roy McCurdy. Joined by electric pianist Hal Galper and (as usual) by brother Nat Adderley on cornet, Cannonball's group turned out a set of soul-jazz that was as funky as contemporary r&b and as challenging as anything Miles Davis was churning out.

"Snakin' the Grass", penned by Galper (and which may or may not refer to rolling a joint), is a standout track. The punishing beat, pounding ahead with Galper's keys and McCurdy's drums leading the way, almost seems suspended by Booker's pendulous bass, whose notes bend up so forcefully that you fear for the instrument. Cannonball's solo announces itself with a wail, then pulls back and tiptoes into the spaces left by the rhythm section, characteristic of the restraint he acquired later in his career after he grew tired of simply playing as fast as possible. He and Nat add little more than accents with the melody, consisting mostly of muted long tones. With a beat like this, they're wise to stay out of the way.

Snakin' The Grass - Cannonball...

999,931: Barry Manilow — Could It Be Magic

Starting in the late 1960's, artists as diverse in their quality and popularity as Blood, Sweat & Tears, Wendy Carlos, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer used the "modernization" of classical music as a pop calling card. While arguably exposing the works of Bach and Mussorgsky to wider audiences, these re-imaginings were not always, um, tasteful. In the hands of Keith Emerson and his Brobdingnagian stacks of keyboard instruments, they were, in fact, tackier than jokes about leisure suits and The Hustle.

Which brings us to Barry Manilow. Given the man's deserved reputation for schmaltzy bombast (and undeserved reputation as a lazy musical punchline), it's something of a surprise that we must turn to him for perhaps the most "polite" use of a classical work in one of the day's charting singles. "Could It Be Magic" begins with Chopin's prelude in C minor, then uses that piece as a launchpad into an epic, lushly orchestrated soundscape that keeps building and building until it has nowhere else to go except...right back to Chopin's prelude in C minor.

While it's best to stay as far away from Manilow's lyrics as possible, I won't. They read like the half-legible scribbles you might find on a piece of notebook paper torn out of a sensitive high school freshman's binder while he was being mauled by the varsity lacrosse team—and your sympathies lie with the lacrosse team. The first lines, about a spirit "whirling like a cyclone in my mind" every time "sweet Melissa" draws near, merely make you cringe while yearning for the poetry of the Allman Brothers. The proceeding ones, describing Melissa as an angel who is the "answer to all answers I can find", make you wonder about the strength of Manilow's SAT vocab score.

Meanwhile the second verse, which begins, "Lady take me high upon a hillside/High up where the stallion meets the sun", leaves you convinced that Manilow has no idea what a stallion is, has never been on a hillside, does not understand where the sun might be located, and has not been introduced to a woman. Either that, or he bought the words off a badly-injured sensitive high school freshman. Luckily, Manilow pretty much runs out of lyrics at this point.

For the next three minutes and twenty seconds, he has nothing to sing but multiple repetitions of the chorus while the orchestration of Chopin's prelude takes on layer after layer of new voices and instruments. Like a slowed, regimented version of the crescendo at the end of "A Day in the Life", a succession of strings, choir vocals, woodwinds, percussion and finally brass instruments join in and grow ever louder, punctuated by stabbing vocals of "Could it be magic" and "Baby I want you". As the rhapsodic crush eventually drowns out Manilow and his vocal recedes, the effect is almost haunting. All the failures of the first two verses, with each bad metaphor diving headfirst off the hillside into the sun, have been erased by Manilow's overwhelming symphonic tour-de-force. The naked sentiments that fell so flat in verse—the ridiculous longing, the inept imagery—are powerfully communicated via music. Finally this cacophony diminishes also, like a tractor-trailer that's been overtaken on a highway, until nothing is left but, once again, the piano and the Chopin tune.

Could It Be Magic - Barry Mani...

999,932: "Rowdy" Roddy Piper — For Everybody

It can be difficult to select just one highlight from an album featuring such aural delights as a duet by Captain Lou Albano and George "The Animal" Steele (covering an NRBQ song about Albano), a passive-aggressive dis track about Rick Springfield by "The Mouth of the South" Jimmy Hart, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura's lengthy bout of pretend vomiting.

But if you put me in a fake-looking full nelson and forced me to choose just one track that resides perfectly at the cross-section of lyrical gibberish and musical listenability (which for The Wrestling Album constitutes a "sweet spot"), I'm putting all my cash on "For Everybody". Or, as it was known before some hilariously nonchalant bowdlerizing, "Fuck Everybody".

For a song whose sentiment is basically, 'screw'em all, including you, Listener', the number is among the least tossed off on the album. Affably squealed by heel "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and co-produced by erstwhile Cyndi Lauper manager David Wolff and Rick Derringer (having resigned himself to a decade of producing novelty acts like 'Weird' Al), it sounds a little like a middling effort by Huey Lewis and the News, with an upbeat melody and a horn section that's asked to do a lot of the heavy lifting; you might almost describe it as "catchy". It also had stones enough to say, y'know, "Fuck Everybody" (pretty much summing up Piper's schtick), right up until the point when someone in the WWF realized that you couldn't (yet) market the F-word to 8-year-olds. The ensuing quality control effort might be construed as "casual" if this weren't an album featuring "King Kong" Bundy and The Iron Sheik on a "Land of 1,000 Dances" remake.

WWF SUIT: "Hey, Piper, whoops, you can't say 'fuck' on the song. You have to change the words."

PIPER: "Do the new words have to make sense?"

WWF SUIT: "Well, we have a dance track sung by The Junkyard Dog called "Grab Them Cakes", and we're releasing that as the single, so - no."

PIPER: "OK. How about a one-syllable word beginning with 'F'? Absolutely any one at all?

WWF SUIT: "As long as it completely changes the song's meaning in a confusing way, go for it!"

So what we're left with is a line wherein Piper invites the listener to kiss his "trash", and a chorus that has him, for some reason, turning the other cheek instead of communicating his disdain.

"The world may not like me; That's ok
There's only one thing I've got to say:
For Everybody!"

Oh, the world just shits on him and I guess he...does stuff for everybody? That's pretty cool. Like the wrestling Jesus.

999,933: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band — Zig Zag Wanderer

Nothing, sweet nothing, sounds the foghorn of incoming marijuana haze like the gong and a whispered “Zig Zag,” blasting us, however gently, into the frozen-fogged world of Captain Beefheart’s streetrat take on “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Freakout go-go beats and guitar figures on repeat couple with the lost hipster Beefheart bark, circa someone’s Summer of Love, reading toilet paper-poetry to hazy demon-chick runaways, who may or may not crash out with The Family, past Topanga, in some squatter pad where the bath water is heated on engine blocks.

One, two, three bass lines curl their fingers through that cat’s cradle of Sears catalog fuzztone guitars, popping bastard shapes in and out of our aural view. A hippie Greek chorus warbles on in, egging on and sanctifying the over-extended billion-bar blues ruminations on locking eyes with the man and the mother and seeing no relation.

Forget the lights and the nights. De-seed, de-stem. Fuck this scene, man, I’m checkin’ out. I’m gonna roll up the coast and find a commune to drop in. I’m taking Safe as Milk, you can keep Revolver.

Zig Zag Wanderer - Captain Bee...

999,934: The Byrds — You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

By the late 60s, Bob Dylan found blowing minds with pop music to be so easy that he stopped doing it. Why bother going through the hassle of recording and touring and answering questions, if he could just hole up and churn out tunes, letting other people sing them while he stayed paid? That was the idea, anyway, when he had a “motorcycle accident” and disappeared with The Band to upstate New York.

I’m assuming they just did lots of drugs and tossed songs into the ether, which surfaced, initially as demo tapes and later as The Basement Tapes when, one presumes, royalties from “The Weight” weren’t pumping enough cocaine directly into Robbie Robertson’s pleasure centers anymore.

Meanwhile, out in LA, The Byrds were reformulating, post-Crosby, with Gram Parsons dragging Roger McGuinn et al over the country line of the folk-rock continuum. The Byrds had caught fire, years earlier, by jangling up some Dylan tunes that weren’t burning the charts up on their own, but they were ebbing well out of the limelight. When this demo got into McGuinn’s hand, it had to seem like his ticket back in.

Instead of the jangly-ennui of those early Dylan covers, we ended up with this honky-tonking dancer of a take on what’s essentially a sad rambler. It would have been easy enough to take this tune and imbue it with whiskey-scented sadness of Waylon or Johnny, but instead, The Notorious Byrd Brothers pepped it up and sang it with a smile.

Missing the entire point of the song (being completely, utterly, helplessly stuck where you are, unable to find direction, and, instead, just waiting for the world to beat a path to your door) seems to have disaster written all over it in deep red Sharpie marker. Amazingly, no. Instead, their misread gives it the peppy optimism of a real lunatic, wild-eyed and sure.

Dylan read it with a moan, laughing at his existential breakdown. The Byrds read it with gusto. Ghoulishly upbeat, but perhaps appropriate for a bunch of famous guys stuck in a town where it’s always sunny, and all the women are beautiful.

You Ain't Goin' Nowhere - The ...

999,935: GG Allin and the Criminal Quartet — Carmelita

Warren Zevon wasn’t prepared for this when he wrote “Carmelita,” but then, nobody was prepared for GG Allin, punk provocateur, to unleash a country record. Is it the aural equivalent of Allin shitting on his audience?

GG couldn’t come near a tune by court order by the time Carnival of Excess saw daylight, and would have been better suited to “Ballad of The Green Beret”-style spoken word country, but the spurting enthusiasm is undeniable.

The background singers are funeral mourners, while GG belts from the casket as it eases into the grave. In its simple, martial, almost incompetent arrangement, the wheezing accordion has more breath left than Allin, as he creeps us back through his day. He’s Lou Reed without the luck and the friends, and he’s unhinged where Reed would be merely detached.

Forget about sadness, this is the pain – the actual physical pain – of running out of methadone and being kicked off of welfare, living in a roach motel by the train tracks, with the radio slipping between stations. This is the sliding precipice of the valley of “What the fuck are we gonna do now,” when the world is swirling around the drain, but before it’s gone, and you realize that you sold the plug to buy something. What was it?

Carmelita - GG Allin

999,936: Muse — Map of the Problematique

Muse is a band I discovered fairly recently after an otherwise regrettable evening watching the FUSE network. And while I can't fully endorse this band right now, when science finally gives us a working time machine I'm definitely shooting a copy of the song "Map of the Problematique" down the magic time tunnel back to the 16 year old version of me.

This thought of blowing the mind of a younger me has come to me a lot of times over the years. Usually I imagine wowing myself with some piece of awesome technology, or I imagine giving him a condescending nudge towards future me's amazingly good taste. But with this Muse song I'd be accomplishing something different. You see, my younger self was kind of lame, and this song is the same lame shit I liked back then with the lameness cranked to absolute maximum lame. Letting high school me hear this song would accomplish no more than making him happy. But I realize now that that is accomplishment enough.

For instance, this song wallows in one of the greatest evils to beset us in this modern age, Pro Tools production. Teen me would not know that Pro Tools would soon roll like a towering log of shit across the face of rock music, leaving behind a stinking plain of uniform brown, pounded flat and polished to a blinding sheen. He would simply sit back and marvel at the monolithic wall of sound that Muse's producer has crafted for them while they were off at the video shoot.

And if there's one word to describe my taste in music back then that word would be "soundscape." From Pink Floyd to Peter Gabriel to later Pink Floyd without Roger Waters, I sought out that immersive musical experience. I wanted music that would not simply blot out the world, but replace it with another world full of fat sampled synth sounds with lots of reverb and delay effects. Muse is nothing if not exactly this times infinity, plus they add that shrill edge of teenage hyper-emotion that is largely missing from the Floyd.

Pop music has always been about adults trying to capture the manic stupidity of the teenage mind, but I feel like they are only recently getting it right, or rather only recently are they capturing the specific flavor of MY manic teenage stupidity. You can hear it in this song. If you're going to sing a line like "Loneliness be over," you don't simply sing it, or scream it, or growl it, or overdub it a few times; you over dub it 50 times over with a bunch of digital processing and place it inside a tornado of guitars and keyboards played by an army of robots. That's just common sense. Prior to 2004 the technology simply didn't exist to do this properly.

Fortunately I don't have to guess or wait for that time machine to find out if this is the perfect song to drop on my younger self, because that shrill soundscape loving dude is still banging around my head. He comes out most often when I'm drunk or stoned and, for the record, he does absolutely fucking love this Muse song.

Map Of The Problematique - Mus...

999,937: Sloan — Coax Me

The payoff of the archetypal power-pop outfit is seldom stab-you-in-the-heart emotion. Usually what you get is some guy with a beard and an ill fitting T-shirt explaining to you that this or that song is NOT in fact about sunshine and moonbeams, provided you ignore all the music and just pay attention to the lyrics the singer wrote ten minutes before drinking himself to death because he was fucked over by his label. Sloan is as archetypal a power-pop band as they come. So it's no surprise that instead of blindsiding you with sadness bombs they excel instead at the four "C"s of power-pop: Cleverness, Catchiness, Craftsmanship and Cleverness. Taken together, these attributes tend to mute the emotional impact of a song, and they are all evident on Sloan's fan favorite "Coax Me" from way back on their second album. So where is all this heart stabbing coming from?

I don't think the answer is to be found in the lyrics. At first glance you might think you're listening to an affecting rumination of aging, loss and mortality, but pay close attention to the details and you realize tha these lyrics make almost no sense at all. The verses are mostly about the singer, a girl, and some guy who died, but the details are all fuzzy and deliberately obtuse. The verses don't connect at all with the chorus about being "coaxed." About the only part of the song that makes any explicit sense is the portion devoted entirely to explaining with precision and clarity the beef that Sloan's Chris Murphy has with mid 90s Canadian Straight Edge/Industrial/Hip-Hop band, Consolidated. This verse is clever and it's catchy, and as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the rest of the song. How it doesn't derail the whole enterprise is something that has eluded me for 15 years. Instead, this verse feels no less poignant than the parts about death and grief.

What I'm saying is that if you're looking for some words to carve into your headstone, you might want to look elsewhere. If, however, you're looking for a song to play at your funeral, you could do worse than this one. It has everything you want from a good funeral tune—it's somber, funny, regretful, uplifting, and ultimately, if you let it, it'll stab you right in the heart.

Coax Me - Sloan

999,938: Scott Walker - Next

Jacques Brel was one of the most renowned performers and songwriters of the Parisian cabaret scene. Not widely known among English-speaking audiences (there’s an obvious language barrier), Brel had a cutting sense of irony that can easily be lost in translation from the original French language and cultural setting. What’s more, Brel was noted for broaching topics that few other writers would touch, with masculine swagger and graphic honesty. All of this can make English translations of Brel songs a jarringly bizarre listening experience. Appropriately, few rock careers have been as jarringly bizarre as that of Scott Walker, Brel’s most prolific English-language interpreter. Walker became a teen idol in Britain in 1966 with the Walker Brothers, none of whose members were actually related, British, or named Walker (Scott’s real last name was Engel). His sobbing baritone was perfect for melodramatic heartbreak ballads, but upon going solo, Walker pursued a much different aesthetic modeled in part on Brel’s work. His own writing was filled with weirdly evocative imagery, sharing Brel’s obsessions with death and the seedier side of life, and it was all wrapped in grandiose orchestrations that often crossed the line into bombast. “Next” (an English translation of Brel’s “Au suivant”) appears on Walker’s second solo album, which actually topped the charts in Britain. It’s a first-person tale of a still-young soldier who loses his virginity in an army-sponsored mobile whorehouse during the war. The song opens with the narrator “naked as sin, an army towel covering my belly.” Naked body follows naked body in and out of the brothel truck, with the efficiency of an industrial assembly line. While the narrator laments his loss of innocence in such a cold fashion, one of his most vivid memories is “the queer lieutenant who slapped our asses”; Walker’s rendition follows with a lisping imitation of said character chanting “Next…you’re next…” (remember, this man was a teen idol just two years previous). The narrator swears on his first case of gonorrhea (which he evidently contracted here) that this voice haunts him, associating it with the smells of whiskey, mud, and corpses. (Apparently nothing makes the horror of war worse than the voice of a homosexual.) Though the now-jaded narrator claims in hindsight that the whole experience “wasn’t so tragic,” it colors his view of new lovers who all seem to be whispering “next…” His dreams are haunted by images of standing “in endless naked lines/Of the following and the followed,” and in the last verse he decides to one day “cut his legs off and burn myself alive” in order to get out of line. By this point, we’re clearly dealing with a metaphor about individuality, though after all we’ve just witnessed, I’ll be fucked if I can figure out exactly what it all represents. Adding to the disorientation, there is nothing in the American pop tradition to reconcile the song’s subject matter with the orchestral musical backdrop. It’s impossible to convey the alien quality of Walker singing Brel’s English translations; even after they’ve been experienced over and over and over again, they never quite lose that sheer “wtf?” factor.

Next - Scott Walker

999,939: Brian Hyland - Let Me Belong to You

‘50s-era teen idol Brian Hyland is best remembered for two hits, the rock ‘n’ roll novelty “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and the heartbreak ballad “Sealed With a Kiss.” In between those singles came the 1961 Top 20 hit “Let Me Belong to You,” Hyland’s first effort as a balladeer. Producers and songwriters Gary Geld and Peter Udell frame Hyland’s sobbing vocals with a silky smooth backdrop, featuring weeping strings, a softly “oooh”-ing vocal group, and a waltz beat perfect for slow dancing. It’s a quintessential teenage love song from the days before the Beatles – except for one thing. Six years prior to Lou Reed’s avant-rock literary adaptation “Venus in Furs,” Geld and Udell have – intentionally or not – captured the psyche of the male sexual submissive in pitch-perfect fashion. It’s not even subtle – the first lines of the song are “Make me your slave/Tie me down, make me behave/Let me belong to you.” In case you miss it the first time, Hyland recites these lyrics again later in the song, borrowing the spoken-verse gimmick heard on records like Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Any modern-day listener who doesn’t know what’s coming will surely stop and listen, open-mouthed, to what these guys managed to stick in a hit pop song from 1961. In this context, the second verse – “Make me be true/Tell me what I can do” – sounds like nothing less than a request for a chastity belt. In the alternate section of the song, Hyland sings “I don’t wanna be free” and that he has “no place special to go,” then returns to the main verse to beg the woman to “Make me your own/Never, never leave me alone.” Without that first verse, all this could be read innocently enough, but now that we’re in fetish territory, we’ve got an interior portrait of a natural submissive lacking a strong presence in their lives – the directionlessness of having no one to please, the lack of assurance, the willingness to give up their own identity for devotion to the object of their desire. It seems highly implausible that the intent of “Let Me Belong to You” was cultural subversion – ultimately, these guys were trying to score a hit. That’s how the music business used to work. And that's what makes this song so striking - they were trying to sell this. Perhaps it’s simply the calculated construction of a product that will hopefully sell to lovelorn teenagers, an attempt to capture the high drama of teenage romance, which ends up taking an entirely subconscious turn. Or perhaps it’s a conscious attempt to express personal, adult feelings in the guise of an innocent teenage love ballad, where it’s not likely to be read as anything other than adolescent melodrama. Whatever the ultimate source, “Let Me Belong to You” captures the weirder side of romantic obsession, something primal in the unconscious sexual wiring of a certain type of mind. As the saying goes, Freud would have a field day.

Let Me Belong To You - Brian H...

999,940: Motorhead - Don't Let Daddy Kiss Me

Heavy metal has never been about subtlety of any stripe. When it comes to social awareness, metal tends to treat serious issues the same way as everything else – by blowing them up into high drama, played for maximum emotion, with very few blanks left to fill in. Perhaps the definitive song about child abuse is Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” which is written with deceptively simple language from the child’s point of view. With the character unwilling to reveal much, most details are left up to the imagination, and the abuse remains the dirty secret it so often is in real life. And then there is Motorhead’s “Don’t Let Daddy Kiss Me,” a largely acoustic ballad from their 1993 album Bastards (which is generally held in high esteem by devotees). Clearly we are talking about something beyond mere physical violence, as the song’s title rather bluntly expresses. Where Vega keeps us on the outside looking in, Lemmy plunks us right in the bedroom, setting most of the song in the aftermath with Daddy and his little girl laying side by side. We get the smells (“She smells his lust and she smells his sweat”), the sounds (“And she listens to him breathe”), and the thinly veiled euphemisms (“His seed is sown where it should not be”). It’s a delicate subject handled the only way heavy metal knows how – by playing the horror to the hilt. But in this case, Lemmy wants listeners to know that he disapproves, so he piles on the sentiment as well, repeating lines about the girl’s prayers to God going unanswered, and crying out in anguish during the short bridge section “Why?! Tell me why! The worst crime…in the world.” Granted, heavy metal has often been misinterpreted as glorifying what it merely aims to dramatize (because it sounds awesome), so Lemmy’s impulse is understandable. But the marriage here between blunt horror and sentimental melodrama is an uneasy one, and when you add in the surface delivery of the song, its crushing awkwardness becomes inevitable. Here, perhaps, is the disconnect: Vega’s hushed, thin vocals can convincingly portray the inner life of a wounded child. But if you could cast any human voice to sonically convey the terror and lost innocence of a female victim of childhood rape and incest…it probably would not be the hoarse whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp of a nearly 50-year-old Lemmy Kilmister. Speaking in her voice during the chorus, crooning “Don’t let daddy kiss me,” Lemmy is totally earnest, his heart on his sleeve, trying mightily to make a serious and emotional statement about a horrific problem that is all too real. And if his song ultimately doesn’t work, its failure makes it much more memorable than a standard-issue Motorhead rocker. (Note: There should be at least 50 awesome Motorhead rockers to follow in the Top One Million Songs of All Time.)

999, 941: Lou Donaldson — Everything I Do Is Going To Be Funky (From Now On)

Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky...

I can imagine the conversation between Lou Donaldson and his best friend- the one that tells him what he needs to hear, instead of what he wants to hear- when Lou came up with the idea for this song.

“Come on, Lou. Everything you do? Really? You understand what your saying, right? For instance, not only will you have to do your taxes funky, but when you’re doing your taxes funky you’ll have to determine your net profit/loss and enter the total on both Form 1040, line 12 and Schedule SE, line 2 funky. You really think you can do that?”

“Uh...”

“Look, it’s a great title. I especially like how you‘ve got ‘From Now On’ in parentheses, like you wish you could go back in time and re-do everything funky, but you realize you can’t, and you’re a little ashamed of that fact. I just worry you’re taking on too much.”

“God, you’re right.”

“Here’s what you do, Lou. Name the song ‘Everything I Do Is Gonna Be Funky (From Now On)’, but when you record it, sing ‘Everything I Play Is Gonna Be Funky (From Now On).’ That way, you’ve got them on a technicality.”

And that’s exactly what Lou Donaldson did. And for the next 5:28 at least, he kept his promise.

999,942: Thelonious Monk — Nutty

Nutty - Thelonious Monk Trio

Other versions of Monk’s songs, slicker ones with horns and decent recording equipment and John Coltrane and Monk's first name spelled correctly on the cover, are way farther up this million-song list. They sound like absolutely nothing else. They’re fantastic. They prove again and again that Thelonious Monk was a genius. But one thing those slick albums don’t always properly accentuate is the fact that Thelonious Monk was kind of crazy sometimes. Certifiably and tragically kind of crazy.

Check out old footage of him. You can’t understand a word he says. He shuffles around in a circle, even during concerts, even in the middle of songs he’s playing. Read about him. Like his dad, he was plagued by mental illness all his life. He did copious amounts of drugs, and drank like a fish.

Then listen to him play the main theme on this spare, recorded-through-a-tin-can-two-rooms-over version of this song. It sounds like he’s banging the piano keys with a couple of socks full of oatmeal. But somehow, he bangs out a quirky, catchy tune with his oatmeal socks.

Without seeming to realize the danger, he does all kinds of outrageous things, things which would kill any other jazz pianist, but coming from Monk they sound great. He turns grave, discordant mistakes into something oddly graceful.

Monk was classically trained, so he knew what he was doing. But his charm lies in the way he sounds like he's constantly stumbling, but somehow gracefully landing on his feet at the same time.

999,943: Pharoahe Monch — Mayor

Back in the late 90’s, Rawkus Records was the king- the hands down, undisputed KING- of putting out rap comps that I liked. They split the difference between the smart but sometimes precious backpack rap I thought I should like, and other, more aggressive stuff I always enjoyed listening to, but which never seemed to completely satisfy- and I’m a little ashamed to use the word here- intellectually.

The first two Soundbombing comps are pretty consistently great, but this Pharoahe Monch track is a standout. It’s one of those rare rap songs that not only has a narrative structure, but which actually has an interesting narrative structure.

We begin in media res, with a brief, but to the point, dramatic scene. The Mayor answers a knock on his door. “Officer Fleming” is outside. The Mayor lets him in and offers him a doughnut. “Officer Fleming” shoots the Mayor in the head.

A searing string loop kicks in, the drums drop, and Pharoahe unpacks the story... sort of. Unlike other mid-90s “I killed the mayor” jams- Cypress Hill’s “Pass Anotha Blunt (While I Kill Da Mayor)”, “Ofukikiltdamayor” by Onyx, or Tribe Called Quest’s classic “Peoples Intrinsic Disciples And Look Out Because I Just Killed The Mayor” for instance, Pharoahe starts with the assassination, glosses over the intense planning, skips the running gun battles with the cops, then goes straight to the part where the shooter holes up in a cheap motel with a mountain of coke and stares into the existential void until he is inevitably tracked down and killed.

He watches a post-assassination riot from the 15th floor “behind the curtains in the nude.” He spent 12 months planning the crime without really worrying about what would happen next. That part doesn’t matter. Fuck it. At least he shot the mayor.

999,944: Herbie Mann - Push Push

Every once in a while, someone sends me one of those lists of "All time worst album covers." Most of them feature men trying hard to be suave or sexy and failing miserably, and no one fails more miserably than Herbie Mann on the cover of his 1971 release "Push Push." Sweaty, hairy, balding, and holding a flute against his greasy shoulder as if he just left an orgy where he had to check his flute at the door, ol' Herbie looks like the type of "Mann" who has heard the old "I Wouldn't Sleep with you if you were the last Mann in the world" line more than a few times. Which is too bad, because the cover probably kept a good chunk of people away from the funky, southern-fried grooves of the title track of "Push Push." While a piano lays down a heavy groove that sounds like it would make a great 1992 gangster rap sample, Herbie and Duane Allman trade off licks, reminding the world that the flute was once played by middle-aged men, and not just those girls in turtle necks that always seemed to be running for student council in your high school.

Duane Allman fits right in with his slide guitar as the band works itself (and, presumably, Herbie's underdeveloped chest) into a real sweat. This is jam-band music played by musicians who aren't too stoned to keep time, and Duane's "Allman" brothers could have learned a thing or two from the session musicians backing up him and Herbie. By the end of this song, you might just imagine oiling up and joining in Herbie's orgy, or at the very least taking the time to photoshop a turtle neck on to the album art for this song in your iPod, so that "Push Push" can play without causing you to throw up in your own mouth when you look down to check the song title.

Push Push - Herbie Mann